Havelok the Dane scholarship has recently benefited from a growth of critical interest in the poem, though less attention has been paid to its narrative mechanics and to resolving its supposed narrative inconsistencies.

Bell and Julie Nelson Couch, the collection comprises thirteen chapters and an Epilogue that derive from the shared interest of the editors and contributors in reading Havelok the Dane in its original manuscript context.

These early dates are important because a fourteenth-century setting for the ballads and ballad-epics like the Gest would correspond with a growing sense of English national identity, evident in thirteenth-century works like the Middle English Havelok the Dane, that continued in subsequent centuries as England grappled with its old enemy, France, and as English authors (like Chaucer and the Gawain-poet) chose English as their literary language, rejecting the lingua Franca still spoken by most members of the aristocracy.

Furrow offers nuanced readings of the Anglo-Norman romances Estoire des Engleis, Le Lai d'Havelok, Horn, and Boeve de Haumtone contrasted with the Middle English Havelok the Dane, King Horn, and the Auchinleck Bevis of Hampton.

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